Setting up:
Contivity VPN 2.1 (OS X 10.2.3) @ LMMS
Email (Apple Mail)
Outlook 2001
Attempts at Entourage for email
Dave Leary
March 14, 2003
Setting Up Contivity 2.1
I have a DSL connection, so this is based on that kind of connection. If you have dial-up you will have to modify to suit your needs. Setting up the VPN client is pretty easy. First step is read the directions. If you don’t want to do that, here is how I did it.
The important thing here is
to click the options button and fill out the screen that comes up. Be sure to select
"Group Security Authentication", and "Response Only Token". Enter
the group ID and password. Also, we have to put in the IP addresses for each connection.
See the internal
LM VPN pages for a
list of these IP addresses as well as the LM group ID and password.
That is all there is to it. I put in my PIN and Token numbers and got a good connection
the very first time. Now the issue is what to do with the connection.
I only do two things with the VPN connection, one is read email and the second is access servers. Under OS 9, by far the best email program I have found for use at LMMS is Microsoft Outlook 2001, which is a free download from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/. Not only is the price right, but it is designed to use Exchange Server, and works just like Outlook on the PC. The main drawback is that Outlook will freeze my computer if anything goes wrong with the connection, even for a second. Unfortunately there is no Outlook for OS X. Since I already had Outlook set up in OS 9, my first thought was to try it under Classic in OS X. This was not as successful as I had hoped. Either the connection was bad all weekend, or there is a problem with either Outlook or Classic. At home I could read email, but not send any replies or new messages. Any attempt to send would result in a freeze. At work I could both read and send, but if the connection was the least bit flaky, Outlook would give me a spinning beach ball and try to freeze. (Force Quit is a wonderful feature of OS X)
Apple Mail
For Apple Mail the set up is a bit harder than for the VPN client. If I set up a new account with a user name of Dleary, the account type is: IMAP, the incoming mail server is: emss01m05.ems.lmco.com the outgoing mail server is: smtp-palo.ems.lmco.com. I had to set up all of the options for keeping mail on the server, etc. Just doing this allowed me to read my email and reply to messages, but did not enable me to look up names from the LMMS directory. To do this, I had to enable LDAP. LDAP is the directory protocol, and it is set up from the Address Book, not from within Mail. Open the Address Book application, open Preferences and click on the LDAP tab. I needed to add a new server with the address: "emss01m05.ems.lmco.com", without the quotes. The port is 389, the scope is "subtree" and search base is left blank. This will cause a little blue icon called "Directories" to appear in the group pane of the Address Book, with the address of the server next to it. If I connect through VPN, I can search the directory for email addresses. I haven’t found a way to get the full information back from the directory yet. Anyway, now close Address Book and with the VPN connection still active, open Mail. Click on the compose mail button, and a new message window opens. Now click on the Address Book icon and notice that the "Directories" icon is nowhere to be seen. Go ahead, say a few bad words (this is called "blessing the keyboard") and take a breath. Now comes the most interesting part. In the "To:" box of the new message, type the last name of someone at LMMS and in a few seconds a list of people with that last name will appear, choose the one you want, and keep adding more as desired. Directory Services is there, Apple has just chosen not to let you know this. The drawbacks I have seen so far are that I can not get my distribution lists into Mail, and Outlook has no way to export the stuff in my personal folders while Mail has no way to import either from an Outlook file. If anyone finds a workaround to that little torment, please let me know.
Entourage
For Entourage, the setup is
even harder still. For me, the account ID is now Acct01\Dleary , and I cannot put
"emss01m05.ems.lmco.com" in for the IMAP server. I have to put in the numerical
IP address. To get the numerical IP address of your server, connect to LMMS via VPN
and then open Network Utility. Click on the "PING" panel and send a ping
to the Exchange server, in my case this is "emss01m05.ems.lmco.com". If
you have a good connection, the window in the ping panel will report 10 times that
it received back 64 bytes from an IP address. This is the numerical IP address of
your Exchange server. Just this setup allowed me to read and reply to email, but
I could not get directory services to work. Supposedly there is a way to make the
LDAP server work (at least the Entourage help file has information on it, but I haven’t
found it yet. Maybe next weekend I will call M$ tech support and see what they say.
There is more information here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/officex/ork/default.asp?EmbFName=Configure_Entourage.asp, but I did not find much on LDAP.
Dave Leary
(david.leary@lmco.com)
TIP
If you have a laptop and want to use the same browser both at work & at home go the Network Preferences (under the apple/location/Network Preferences in 10.2.3) and set up a location for work and one for home. Put the LMMS proxy server you use in the work location and put nothing in the home one. This lets me toggle by changing locations. If you haven’t yet gotten Safari from Apple, try it. Safari is much faster than IE.